On the Etymology of the Word 'Ramps'

For such a delicate plant--available for only a few weeks in spring, beloved by top-tier chefs, detested by cranky bloggers--the ramp has a very ugly name. It's a lump of a word that brings to mind highways and municipal safety laws. If you've never heard them mentioned before, a "ramp" barely sounds like food at all.

So how did it enter the edible lexicon? Most recently, it came to American English from Southern Appalachia, where it's a regional word for what a lot of other people just call a "spring onion," or "wild leek." But from Appalachia, the thread goes much farther back, to the Scotch-Irish emigrants who settled that area, then to the Old English dialects of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, and, ultimately, all the way back to Ancient Greek.

But let's start with the English history. First, in Old English, the plant (although a slightly different one, since the ramp you're likely to run into in the U.S. is a different species of wild leek) was a hramsa, which is similar to the word in Old German (ramese), which led to similar words in all the Scandinavian languages. And in Old English, when you wanted to pluralize some words, you didn't add -s, you added -en. That formation isn't productive anymore (nobody's going around talking about "laptopen" and "iPaden"), but it's how we got words like "oxen" and "children." So hramsa turned into hramsen, which then led to the same plant being called both "rams" and "ramson," with a double-plural "ramsons" thrown in sometimes for good measure.

Then, just for ease of pronunciation, people started popping a "p" in there, making "ramps." This happens sometimes (we added an "n" to "passenger" and "messenger" from the French passager and messager, just because we felt like it), and probably just came from generations of little kids deciding that "ramps" was easier to say than "rams" (next up: spaghetti-pasketti). But, like "ramson" and "ramsons" before it, somewhere along the way we forgot that "rams" was actually the singular, and started calling a lonely "ramps" a "ramp."

If you want to go way (way) back, that Old English hramsa comes from the same Indo-European base that led to the Ancient Greek word for "onion" (kromion) and the Russian and Irish words for "wild garlic" (ceremsa and creamh, respectively).

So even if the ramp you get on top of your fancy burger, in your salad dressing, or in your expensive cocktail was only picked that week, and will be gone as quickly as it came, at least its name has some staying power.